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Institute of Economic Affairs

“Our mission is to improve understanding of the fundamental institutions of a free society by analysing and expounding the role of markets in solving economic and social problems.”

The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) is a cesspit brimming with rancid cheerleaders for soulless anti-society free market thuggery.

IEA main objectives are the promotion of an extreme free-market approach to fiscal funding of essential public services and the removal of all workers’ rights. The purpose of both is to feed the chancers, gamblers, confidence tricksters and con artists of the financial gangster cadres, at the expense of the majority of the people. The strongest theme in IEA literature and policy is support for the destruction of the NHS.

The tone of the IEA literature is part pseudo-academic claptrap, part “alt-right” blog. It is lazy verbal trickery that pretends to analyse an issue and, remarkably, always concludes that less public funding and/or gross reductions in employees’ rights are the solution. Imagine the Kray Twins employing a conman to explain how a violent protection racket is a desirable objective for those being “protected.” There is arrogant, smug heartlessness throughout.

An example of IEA’s political ideology and of its mode of communication is Kristian Niemietz‘s plea for the NHS to be dismantled. His paper Universal Healthcare without the NHSpretends to be an academic study of the history of the NHS with comparisons to health services in other countries. It is a concoction of selective analyses and imaginative deductions designed to attain the conclusion that all NHS services should be given away wholly to private parasites. The fact that he calls patients “consumers” tells you all you need to know. In an accompanying blog that acts as a pointer to the paper –Niemietz blog, he displays the petulant attitudes that permeate IEA’s mode of communication: “I decided to make life a bit easier for the Twittermob that normally comes out, wielding the virtual pitchforks, when I publish something on healthcare,” Niemietz states followed by a selection of short retorts he has encountered.

Neil Record, Mark Littlewood, Kristian Niemietz and Kate Andrews

The chairman of IEA is Neil Record. He founded and chairsRecord plc, a company that creates wealth for its clients via currency gambling and hedging. That is, a company rammed right in the decaying anus of exploitative capitalist gangsterism.

Director General Mark Littlewood pops up on TV and radio frequently. He is deliberately childishly provocative.

Kate Andrews is a veteran of many extreme free-market think-tanks in USA and UK, most recently at Tax-Payers’ Alliance.

Other faces that might be seen in the media are listed here: IEA Staff.

Despicable DonorsAs the table on page 7 of a Transparify report into think-tank donor transparency shows, IEA keeps its financial backers secret. Alongside three other cheerleaders for public services destruction, Adam Smith Institute, Centre for Policy Studies and Policy Exchange, IEA doesn’t want the public, who are the target of its ideology, to know which tax-dodging organised international thieves and fraudsters are employing PR machines like the IEA.